# Polynomials: I’ve just made a text-based UI, slightly user-friendlier.

One of the facts which I’ve written about before was, that I had written a C++ program which finds numerical approximations to the roots of polynomials, preferably difficult polynomials to which there can be no exact solution. And one of the facts about my program, which I was never completely satisfied with, had less to do with the actual algorithm that gets closer and closer to each root, but has more to do with how my code could be inaccessible to those readers, who do not already know how to use a compiler.

Specifically, I had written a version of the program which somebody executes from ‘the Command Prompt’, as it’s called under Windows, because under Linux, power-users access features with one-line commands often. Yet, if a user was not such a power-user, then what they might do under Windows could be, just to double-click on the .EXE-File (the Application icon), observe that a console window briefly appears, and then watch it disappear again. There could be users who do not know how to navigate their Command Prompt windows to the folder into which they unzipped the program, and then execute that program from within their Command Prompt / Terminal Window.

And so, even though I kept the code roughly the same – it’s still text-based – I changed it subtly, to help out potential readers who may have had that problem. You may try it and see if you like it. The compressed files can be found at the following location:

https://dirkmittler.homeip.net/binaries/

And, within the table of contents which gets displayed there, the reader would either be interested in the file ‘Roots_Dirk_Mittler.tar.gz‘, or the file ‘Roots_Dirk_Mittler.zip‘ – in either case, the file-name that begins with a single ‘R’.

Enjoy,

Dirk